[Torchlight 2] Would this be possible to mod?

[Mushroom]

One of the things that the original Diablo had that few if any ARPGs have had since (I can't think of any except Magicka) is friendly fire.

I'm not talking about deliberate PvP. I'm talking about playing co-operative but needing to be careful that you don't blow each other up as well as the enemies.

My wife and I still have fond memories of playing Diablo on LAN and screaming at each other because her rogue would always accidentally shoot me in the back and my sorcerer would fill a room with charged bolts without leaving her space to maneouvre.

Obviously this would be a pointless thing to mod into the game in Torchlight because it's single player only, but does anyone know if it would be possible to make a Torchlight 2 friendly fire mod?

I'm hoping that each effect basically has a "hurts playesr", "hurts monsters" or "hurts everyone" flag and it would basically be a case of switching all the flags to "hurts everyone".

With luck, such a mod would work for both monsters and players, so monsters could accidentally hurt each other too (cue the big boss throwing a large attack at you that clears out his own minions too)...

[Deadnoob]

I just looked in ToerchED for TL1 and saw that in the skills editor you can set the "Target Type" of a skill. One of the options is "Everyone" so I'm guessing this would be doable provided the same option exists in TorchED 2, but tedious given the sheer number of skills.

-EDIT- Bear in mind that I have no idea how to mod so there may well be much more to it than that. The option appears to be there from a cursory glance, though.

[SixshotOverdrive]

Yes, a friendly fire mod would be possible.

I'm not sure you'd want to enable it for monsters though. Their AI isn't made to take friendlies into account, and with all the AoE spells in TL2 they'll likely kill each other off before you get a chance to. So with that in mind, it would probably be a lot easier, or at least less tedious, to have PvP always on rather than changing each skill individually.

[Arkham]

I worry about one thing in this regard:

Some skills can be fun with this kind of change (D1's charged bolt was brought up as an example). You just have to be careful about how you use it.
Some, though, would be nigh-useless with such a feature on. D1's Nova spell comes to mind. There's very little caution could do to help you consciously avoid a 360 degree circular lightning blast; you had to be hidden behind terrain or, if you were far enough away, slide through a gap in the circle.

What I wonder is: could there be a way for skills to do a percentage of their normal damage to other players?
I know the Unreal Tournament games have something like this, where friendly fire can be set to be a percentage/decimal value of the normal amount of damage done. That could be helpful since it would keep some of the crazier AOE skills useful, even with this sort of mode turned on.

[Mushroom]

The other thing to watch out for might be that some skills could be coded to do damage in an area that includes the player using the skill. For example something like a Nova might (from a technical perspective) do damage to all in a circle centred on the player rather than to all in a ring around the player. Normally this doesn't matter because they only affect monsters, but with Friendly Fire turned on we might discover that the player hurts themselves every time they use one of these skills.

[SixshotOverdrive]

The other thing to watch out for might be that some skills could be coded to do damage in an area that includes the player using the skill. For example something like a Nova might (from a technical perspective) do damage to all in a circle centred on the player rather than to all in a ring around the player. Normally this doesn't matter because they only affect monsters, but with Friendly Fire turned on we might discover that the player hurts themselves every time they use one of these skills.

That would be an issue with making the skills target everyone. Not only would your pet be rather useless as it kept running between you and your fireballs, but using certain skills would be downright suicidal. You could account for this in skills like nova by making the damage shape an outward travelling ring rather than an area, but other ones like blizzard or the pillars of fire you'd need to cast and run like hell.

Arkham brings up a good point and even if you accounted for the damage shapes, you'd still be killing team-mates pretty consistently. So what you could do is leave the skills targeting enemies and set up a secondary effect which targets friends. This could be a percentage of the damage, reduced timers, or whatever else you want really. It's probably the most labour intensive solution, but it also seems like the best option.

[Mushroom]

That would be an issue with making the skills target everyone. Not only would your pet be rather useless as it kept running between you and your fireballs, but using certain skills would be downright suicidal. You could account for this in skills like nova by making the damage shape an outward travelling ring rather than an area, but other ones like blizzard or the pillars of fire you'd need to cast and run like hell.

Ideally, you'll be able to specify who the skill targets independently of who the skill hurts. So in the case of things like pillars of fire they'd still go for the enemy but could hurt you if you got in the way.

Without that distinction, your pet would probably keep fireballing you...

Arkham brings up a good point and even if you accounted for the damage shapes, you'd still be killing team-mates pretty consistently. So what you could do is leave the skills targeting enemies and set up a secondary effect which targets friends. This could be a percentage of the damage, reduced timers, or whatever else you want really. It's probably the most labour intensive solution, but it also seems like the best option.

Accidentally killing team mates is half the fun. Have you ever played Magicka?

[SixshotOverdrive]

Yeah sorry, that was poor wording on my part. The skill and it's effects do have independent targets. So your pet spells and homing missiles will still be aimed at monsters, you'd just have to try not to stand between them.

I guess it really all depends on how you want it to work, but whichever option you go with is entirely do-able.
If you want full damage suicide spells; You'd change the effects target to everybody.
If you want full damage to team mates but not yourself; Setting PvP always on would be your best option.
If you want scaled damage to team mates and/or yourself; You'd need to set up a secondary effect.